Migrations: Journeys into British Art at Tate Britain – in pictures

A new exhibition at Tate Britain reveals how British art has been shaped by successive waves of migration, tracing not only the movement of artists but also the circulation of visual languages and ideas

Thursday 26 January 2012 04.50 EST

Go West Young Man (1987) by Keith Piper

Migrations sees British art and identity as a 500-year dialogue with Europe, America, the Commonwealth and ex-colonies

Portsmouth Dockyard (c1877) by James Tissot

Like his friend Whistler (another incomer, from America), Tissot enjoyed painting water. For him, water was the site of human drama, choices and departures. Here, a Highland sergeant sits between two women in a skiff. Two ships behind echo the choice he is treacherously making as he turns from his plaid-shawled companion to a Renoir-ish lass lifting her face to his

Between the Two My Heart is Balanced (1991) by Lubaina Himid

This painting by a Tanzanian-born artist reworks Tissot's Portsmouth Dockyard. Himid got rid of the harbour setting and military male: her women sit either side of a pile of papers – which possibly represent other lost migrants. "Two women in a small boat tearing up navigation charts," Himid has explained. "How many died, crossing the water?"

Jews Mourning in a Synagogue (1906) by William Rothenstein

Rothenstein, who was born in 1872 and whose German-Jewish father migrated to Bradford to work in textiles, wanted to be part of the middle class of English art. In 1906, the Whitechapel Art Gallery's exhibition of Jewish art made religion the touchstone of Jewish identity, as in Rothenstein's painting Jews Mourning in a Synagogue, but claimed that Jewish artists identified themselves completely with England, with no distinctive thought or differentiation of artistic sentiment Photograph: The estate of Sir William Rothenstein/Bridgeman Art Library